


Fantasy Toypunk Siege

by Manaya_Karyam



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-21
Updated: 2015-03-21
Packaged: 2018-03-18 20:33:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3583032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Manaya_Karyam/pseuds/Manaya_Karyam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A cautionary tale.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Secret War

Chapter 1: Secret War

Nia's mother called her for dinner for the fifth time, then she started counting. Nia came down the stairs in a huff.

"I was in the middle of a battle," she said.

"I was in the middle of cooking you dinner, ungrateful child."

Under her breath, Nia said "I was in the middle of saving your life, ungrateful adult."

"What was that?" said her mother.

They sat with her father at the table, joined hands and said a quick blessing.

"I pray the north gardens won't be overrun by the time I get back," Nia said to God. Her mother gave her a sharp look, even though she hadn't been talking to her mother.

"How was your day?" her mother said to her father. Nia started to tune out, poking at her purple potatoes with her fork.

"Blah blah blah tickets," said Nia's father. "Blah blah exhibit blah blah blah."

"Blah blah blah?" her mother asked.

Nia tried one of the potatoes. It tasted like a normal potato, which was both a relief and a disappointment. She drank some milk.

"Blah blah blah dinosaur," said her father.

"What?" said Nia, looking up quickly.

"I said the dinosaur exhibit is opening this weekend." He smiled at her mother. "Of course  _that_  gets the kid's attention." Nia felt a little annoyed at being stereotyped.

"So you have model dinosaurs and stuff?" Nia asked.

"Oh, all kinds of things. There's one display that's a big stone with various dinosaur footprints in it..."

"What about in the gift shop?" Nia asked. "There are little dinosaur models, right? Plastic is fine."

Her father's face returned to its usual unimpressed frown. "You just want a new toy, don't you. As if it's always Christmas, or your birthday. It always comes back to that with you."

Nia's stomach twisted. "Well, technically, yes..."

"Is this about your pretend war thing again?" said her mother, eyebrows arched accusingly.

"Yes."

"I feel like that's all you think about these days." She rolled her eyes, clearly fed up with Nia's obsession.

"Well, it's a big job," said Nia evenly, "keeping an evil spider-woman from entering our house and eating us all up."

Silence at the table. Her parents looked away from her, her mother glaring at nothing, as if waiting for her words to decompose into dust, so they could pretend she hadn't said them.

Nia finished her dinner.

As soon as possible, she raced back to her room, skipping dessert. Her parents seemed a little surprised every time she skipped desert, even though it was getting to be every night. It was like they never bothered to change their model of how kids acted around dessert.

Nia stepped carefully over the toys all set out at points on her pentacle rug. Some sixth sense in her could already see that some of the army men had lost their inner glow; they were dead. She tossed these in the Dead Box next to her toy box and then knelt in the pentacle's center and closed her eyes.

She willed herself to calm. Focused on her quick heartbeat, short breaths. Smoothed them out. She had to be patient. She made her breath even and settled her nerves. Like falling asleep, she soon slipped to the other world.

Her body materialized, as it always did, next to Bun-Bun, who was a towering loaf of dog that walked upright like a human. He was her bodyguard in this world; in the other world, he was a stuffed animal she slept with at night, whom she had taken to be a bunny when she first found him on the sidewalk when she was six.

Nia's base of operations was a Barbie Dreamhouse. She was on the top floor in a room on the north side, and she went to the grand stained glass window to look down on the north gardens. There were no enemy combatants, which she thought was good until she realized there were no friendly combatants. The enemies were inside.

"Oh  _no,_ " Nia said, not yet familiar with any swear words, and she hurried to the stairs, taking them two at a time. Bun-Bun put a paw on her shoulder - he wished to go on ahead of her, not behind, which she realized was wise. They hurried through the brightly colored rooms, the bodyguard entering each one first to be sure it was safe for the commander.

They found Barbie and three troll dolls - a green, a purple, and a blue - holding closed the door to the entrance hall as something banged on it from behind.

"What is it?" said Nia.

"Shamblers," said Barbie. "They dripped ink all through the flower beds."

"That sucks," said Nia.

"I may have to replant. Just as soon as I rip the heads off these mother fudgers."

"Can you four hold this door until daytime?"

"I think so," said Barbie, just as a hand burst through a high window, scattering shards of plastic.

"Are you in there, my pretty?" squealed the spider-woman from outside, waving her pale hand about. She gripped the edges of the window and began prying then apart to let herself through. "I'm coming iiiiin!"

"Please do," said Nia to the spider-woman.

The spider-woman paused. "So you do like me better than your real parents," she gloated. But she was clearly confused by Nia's response.

"I do," said Nia. "I've come to my senses."

The spider-woman lifted her sackcloth face to the window hole, looking in and frowning. "This is a trap," she said. "You want me to come in, therefore it is a trap."

"No," said Nia, trying to strike the right balance between looking like it was a trap, and looking like she didn't want to reveal that it was a trap.

"And yet," said the spider-woman, "I look in this room and see emptiness and unpreparedness. No more units than before." The shamblers continued to bang on the door. "And so I think that the trap was nothing but a bluff!" Stitched face grinning wide, she began to crawl insectlike through the window, legs clicking. Nia shot a meaningful glance at the petrified Barbie, and winked, and -

"Nia!" Barbie shrieked. Yes, she remembered! "If we die now, I just want to say - I hope you had a really nice birthday!"

The spider-woman froze.

Nia's breath caught.

Everyone stared at everyone. The spider-woman's 'eyes', such as they were, narrowed in suspicion.

"Nice try," the spider-woman sneered. Then she backed back out of the window and out of sight. The shamblers stopped banging.

Nia breathed out. "Hit on all sixes," she said to Barbie. But that trick would only work once, unless maybe they did it on the exact same day next year.

"I suppose she's going for reinforcements now," Barbie said. "Because she thinks  _we've_  beefed up. So... I hope you  _are_  doing so now, lord."

"I'm working on that," said Nia. "Don't worry."

Nia stayed to keep watch until day broke, which meant night was falling back in her world.

 When she exited her trance, she found that all the rest of her army men had died. She threw them in the Dead Box as well.

* * *

"Do you know there's a dinosaur exhibit opening at the museum?"

"No," said Stuart.

"I don't know what's more awesome than dinosaurs," said Nia. "Like from the gift shop, for instance." She was hinting, badly.

"I know what's more awesome," said Stuart. Stuart reminded her of a lizard. She hated him. It was recess, and they were hiding out in a dark spot under the play structure. Nia essentially thought of Stuart as a fence for toys.

"Fire/Ice Dragons," said Stuart. "Is more awesome."

"Dragons?"

"It's a whole setup," he said. "Not just dragons, it's a whole fortress and little trolls and people, two opposing sides, and it goes together like legos. And there's dragons. Really bad-A."

"Is it fire or ice?" said Nia, confused. Fire she could work with. Ice was not to be attempted again.

"It's both."

"You got it, then?" She could trade dead toys for new toys, which was wonderfully convenient. It also told her that no other kids were trying to fight these battles in their own other worlds. Only her.

"For Christmas, I think."

Christmas wasn't soon enough at all. A frisson of anger swept down her spine. She punched him in the arm hard and a new bruise joined her previous ones. Stuart leaned away, pouting.

Nia's thinking was this: she had to strike now while the spider-woman was away getting reinforcements. The problem being that the spider-woman was  _already_  stronger  _without_  reinforcements, which was why Nia had had to bluff in the first place. They could maybe punch through the spider-woman's front gate, but lose most of their units in the process. And then, just maybe, have enough left to find and destroy her power source...? She really didn't want to bet her life on that.

There was also the matter of Nia herself fighting. She could do a lot of damage if she got inside, depending what was on tv. But if she joined the rush on the front gates she would be one of the first ones picked off, and though that wouldn't kill her real-world self, Nia was a unit Nia could not afford to lose.

_"Ooooh,"_  said a child, face up against the bars that blocked off their hiding place. "Nia and Stuart, sitting in a tree! Kissing!"

Stuart went white. Nia's temper flared again. If I  _could_ get in the stronghold somehow, I'd really smash them up, she thought.

The boy turned and yelled to the playground. "Nia and Stuart, sitting in a tree! Kissing!"

"You're supposed to  _spell_  'kissing'," Stuart grunted.

"I  _can_  spell 'kissing'," said the boy, wrinkling his nose.

Nia jerked forward and grabbed the boy's striped shirt, pulling. His shoulder and the ridge of bone next to his eye bonked into the bars of play structure, painfully. Nia held him there, but he wasn't yelling out anymore. He went halfway to crying. "Oww!" he said.  _"Oooww!!"_

A yard teacher walked over, then crouched down and looked into the hiding place. "Let go of him, Nia," she said. "And get out of there, you two. Play in the sun."

Nia let go. The boy's shirt was slightly stretched, and her arm flexed in a clawlike shape. She was only half present, thinking about the assault on the stronghold. Tonight. It was all happening fast. She wanted to beat her demon. It would feel so good. That night when she tranced -

Oh. And suddenly the solution seemed obvious.

That night, before she tranced, she closed her door tightly. Later she would be using the tv, and Nia had used up all her screen time for the week in the earlier attacks by the spider-woman - those which had pushed her back all the way to Barbie's Dreamhouse. She was not allowed to watch any more tv. The thought of her parents catching her made her insides twist up - her parents' strongest emotion was punishment. If she really wanted them to pay attention, all she had to do was make them angry.

She arranged her toys - Bun-Bun, Barbie, trolls, Party Animals, etcetera... and she sat in the center of the rug, and made herself drift off...

She appeared by Bun-Bun once again. In her absence he had wandered up again to the small door in the top floor of Barbie's House, which connected to the small door in Nia's real-world home. The door had been sealed since Nia had first seen through the spider-woman's tricks and traps. Standing by this door was as close as he could be to her while she was in her own world. The door was also how the spider-woman thought to get to her.

They descended the floors, not to the entrance hall this time but to the war room, which was the dining room with everything but the big table cleared out. Nia willed her other units to meet them there.

They assembled around the table, all seemingly plastic but moving with an unnerving sort of life. Nia considered them tools; they had begun as objects she owned, and they were still. Maybe it would be different if her life weren't in danger.

"Everyone," she said. "Punch through into the stronghold. Bun-Bun leads, he gets in first, no matter what. It's the last battle we will ever need. We win now, or we never do. So just, everyone. Go."

The Party Animals looked at her dolefully. They were simplified marionettes, two-legged furred creatures that drifted through the air as if someone was holding their control bar. Nia simply held their gaze.

"Like right now I mean," she said. And everyone left the room. Nia untranced.

Nia turned on the tv, then frantically turned down the volume. Voices came out at a whisper. She glanced fearfully at the door.

Then she calmed herself and began to flip channels. Many were boring. Most were live action. Cartoons would be best. And then she found something. "Perfect," Nia murmured, smiling weakly.

She waited. The tv show played quietly. There was a weight in the base of Nia's stomach. Some other child whom she had never been would get to watch this show and enjoy it. Get to know who these characters were. Maybe that could be her later. Tomorrow. Or maybe she would be dead.

Her toys were dying around her. The ones she had left were tough, not like the army men. They died one at a time, not quickly. Each troll had a special ability - ice, gas, lightning. Based on hair color. It was ridiculous. It didn't matter, they were dead. She didn't throw them in the dead box, she couldn't bring herself to. This was the last stand. After today, they would all be just toys again. Or something. She found that she wanted to cry, but that was not something she did.

It had surely been long enough.

Be calm. No tears in war. The light from the tv showed through her closed eyelids, but she was good at this, and she was gone in a wink.

Nia appeared next to Bun-Bun - already inside the grey, webbed halls of the spider-woman's stronghold.


	2. Mother and Daughter in Childhood's Ashes

Chapter 2: Mother and Daughter in Childhood's Ashes

The spider-woman's stronghold had hugely high ceilings. The ceilings and the walls were covered in spiderwebs, truly covered, so thick you couldn't see through. Where Nia's troops had come in, a huge, ragged hole was ripped in the web, and several bodies lay in the doorway. The Party Animals' strings were cut. Bun-Bun lay beside Nia, bleeding stuffing.

_Bleeding stuffing._ What an absolute joke. His sides were ripped. His face, his hard plastic nose, was dented. She didn't really know plush injury, but maybe he was about to die. If she had entered this world after he died, where would she show up? Maybe defaulted back to Barbie's Dreamhouse.

The enemy units in the doorway - golems - now turned toward Nia. There were cobbled-together monsters whose features were all in different places. They seemed to have been haphazardly made of clay, then given life, like the first of humanity in Greek myths. Now they charged at her, but she blew them backwards with a jet of air.

The show she had chosen was linking into her mind. There was new information, free information. A series of body movements, like martial arts, revealed itself to her, and she followed it and willed the world to change -

The golems got up, but now she made the stone of the floor jet up and ram into them - then again from the other side, shattering them into pieces.

Nia turned and ran deeper into the stronghold. At doorways some inky-black shamblers blocked her, and she cast a jet of fire - they caught and burned furiously, as if they were covered in tar. She knocked them aside with rocks and moved on. Then there were spiders - they also burned.

Many rooms were empty. One had a small scale model of Nia's home base and defenses, which was funny, because here it looked like a doll house again.

Nia found a room filled with tanks that glowed green. _Here we are._ Young enemies grew inside, bobbing in a liquid, growing up to one day help their maker eat Nia's family. Using a 'tearing apart' sort of motion, Nia made the liquid expand and smash its own way out of the tanks, leaving the creatures aborted. She ran to the back of the room and banged open the cabinets that lined it. There were spare parts; replacement parts for the spider-woman herself. She swept some onto the floor, carelessly. In the back of the room was her goal: a huge, blank stretch of spiderweb-covered wall, heavily reinforced.

She poured fire on the spiderwebs, harder and harder until they melted away. This revealed a layer of wood, which burned as well. Then stone, which she took control of and shifted, levitating it out of its place and then throwing it to the ground behind her. Next metal - she concentrated, and in the metal were tiny fragments of stone. These she gripped, symbolically and mentally, and pulled apart, and the metal screamed and ripped down the middle, opening the way to the spider-woman's power source, a disembodied heart.

Her own heart pumping hard, Nia stepped forward, and then a hand lightly found her shoulder.

"Nice try," said the spider-woman, as Nia stood frozen.

Then Nia turned and blasted fire but the spider-woman skittered away, to the side and up the wall and overhead and down to stand between Nia and the heart.

Nia's eyes flickered to the side - the spare parts were gone. They'd formed a new copy.

The two opponents stood, eyes locked.

"I pay attention, you know," said the spider-woman. "To all your little tricks and strategies. I know what's in your mind."

"Yes," said Nia quietly. "It's commendable."

"Thank you. A naive girl like this - how have I not yet eaten you?"

"Naive? When you tried to trick me, sure," said Nia. "But you've taught me -" _a lot,_ but she interrupted herself with a blast of fire. The spider-woman lunged out of the way, her legs clacking down on the floor to the right, and she dashed forwards pointing needle-like fingers that clicked against each other. Nia built up and _pushed_ a jet of air, throwing the spider-woman back against a smashed incubation tank's jagged glass edge. The woman wasn't cut; her torso was made of metal and rubber. Nia readied another fire blast as

"Nia! What do you think you're doing?"

the spider-woman was getting up already and, wait, what?

Black, lifeless tv screen - her mother's face in hers. "Pay attention when I speak to you!"

The real world grabbed at her attention. Two forces pulled her

mind in different directions

but Nia stayed _calm_ , yes, her breathing level, and her views of both places

were superimposed on each other -

The spider-woman was looming over her. Nia was on the ground. Oh, no, her elements were gone - she scrambled back. A stabbing finger pierced her arm, cut a shallow gash as she propelled herself away. She felt the cut just as she was breathing out, so her scream made no sound, only squeezed her chest.

Her mother was saying something, but she couldn't afford to listen. Then her mother was shaking her, and her vision of the other world flickered. A pain shot through her head like Harry Potter's scar. She opened her eyes - saw only her mother in her room, no, no - she closed her eyes but 

_opened_ them, and saw only the spider-woman's horrible sackcloth face, plastic eyes, her widening dark mouth, moving toward her, and she wished in a terrified instant that something, anything could come to the rescue, she visualized it happening -

A huge jaw of teeth clamped down across the spider-woman's neck, and she ceased to come closer. At this moment the teeth were all that existed - in the next moment Nia had time to imagine the reptilian face, the head and neck, and then existence swept down the back and down the legs and tail and the full dinosaur formed out of the air. It lifted the limp spider-woman high over Nia's head, dangling.

"What have you done," said the spider-woman, eyes wide.

Nia imagined that the painful cut in her arm was healed, and it was.

Oh... wow. She could really just...?

All this time?

Of course that was how this world worked. Of _course._ Her stomach was twisting, untwisting - it didn't feel quite over yet, she couldn't relax, _what was there to do next -_

Nia imagined that the spider-woman would be frozen in time, completely frozen, until next she came calling. Then she untranced.

* * *

"Huh?" Nia said, pretending to wake up.

"Don't 'huh' me, missy. That wasn't any sleep, that was your weird meditation thing. None of that's real, you know! It's all imaginary! Now what do you have to say about watching tv behind my back?"

"Sorry." She said it without meaning much of anything. None of this felt real. It didn't fit with what had really been happening. She had saved their lives.

"Don't sass me," said her mother. "Grounded for the week."

Nia's mouth opened in indignation, purely by instinct.

"Is that understood?"

"That's understood," said Nia, hoping her mother would leave, and she did.

* * *

Nia returned to the other world, appearing by Bun-Bun's body. She imagined-into-being two new units, in the form of an adult man and woman - they were not living, just puppets. Then she led them to the top floor of Barbie's Dreamhouse, near the small door. Nia untranced,

went to the door in her room, and unsealed it, welcoming the man and woman into her house. The three of them went downstairs.

She met her parents in the kitchen. They were startled.

"Who are you two?" said her father, looking over Nia's head. "What are you doing in here?"

"Please listen to your daughter," said the man.

"I'm going away," said Nia.

"Where on Earth do you think you're going?"

"Nowhere on Earth."

"Nia will be perfectly safe," said the woman.

"Now, see here, do you think you're going to walk in here and kidnap my daughter?"

"I'm kidnapping myself," said Nia.

She went, not to the front door, but up to her room. The adults followed. Her parents were flustered.

Nia's two constructs went through the door and Nia followed.

"Where on Earth does this door go?" said Nia's father.

"Nowhere," she repeated.

"You get out of there right now," said Nia's mother, sounding scared. Nia was already too far in to be pulled out.

Once in the other world, she evaporated the two adults. Still on the top floor of the Dreamhouse, she walked forward - and as she did, she imagined that the wall disassembled itself in front of her. It became a sparkling silver walkway that led out into the air, and farther and farther, across the battlefields that she and the spider-woman had used in the past. The sky and horizon were blank white; this was a small world. It had been made for the spider-woman to hunt her.

When Nia returned to the dinosaur holding the spider-woman, she found everything exactly like before, except that the original copy of the spider-woman was hiding and tried to sneak up on her. Nia had already imagined that she would know everything that was happening in her general vicinity, so she noticed and destroyed that copy, then let the other speak.

"Please spare me," said the spider-woman.

"Sure," said Nia. "In fact, I'm thanking you." Though her voice was still a little hard.

"For what?" said the spider-woman, aghast.

"For teaching me, and paying attention to me, and challenging me," said Nia. "Though if you ever again try to eat a sentient creature, I'll kill you."

"How do you know I don't need to do that to survive?"

"If you do, it doesn't change that rule."

A curt nod. Nia had the dinosaur set the spider-woman down.

"You know the ways in and out of this place," Nia said. "I want to get out and see what more there is in existence. Where you came from."

"I don't doubt it," the spider-woman grinned. "There are certain ways. None so uniform as a door, but I can teach you what you need. But what about your parents?"

"I fired them," said Nia. "I always felt like you played their role better."

Nia smiled, powerful but warm.

The spider-woman tried to smile back, unsure of what would come next. She reached for Nia's hand, to bring her out of this world. Nia took it, after imagining a glove on just in case.

Then the two of them left.


End file.
